My mother used to complain about the cost of “incomplete clothing.” Made restless by our suburban neighbourhood, we would sometimes drive to the shopping mall one town over, and, to my preadolescent horror, she would suddenly become a kind of fashion critic. If I tried my luck in a fitting room and slipped on a pair of lightly distressed jeans, she’d draw her face into a cartography of distaste, sigh the wearied sigh of a Black mother and say, “But why must I pay more money for less fabric?” For me, it was a question of style; for her, it was a question of morality. I did not, at the time, have the language to explain to her that the gashes had to be applied after the jeans were completed,…
